58 that housed the casino is in disuse. Visitors to Havana can hardly help thinking about how little there is to show for all the Soviet aid that was pumped into Cuba over the past thirty years. Fidel will be remembered in part for squandering a substantial part of that largesse on foreign adven- tures-for being, as some Cubans put it, the only head of a colony who has ever managed to exploit an empire. The majority of Cubans alive today weren't born at the time of Castro's revolution. Its mystique is said to be lost on the young, who in Havana now deride the "Socialism or Death" signs, telling one another that there has to be a better option. According to diplomats and some Cubans, a song called "The Man Is Crazy" is popular among the young people, and is even sung aloud when they are alone. They worry that Fidel's addiction to principle will carry not just him but also them over the cliff. One is left wondering whether this concern is shared to some degree by the Army, where comrades of Ochoa stil1 serve, and by the police. W HEN it became clear that Fidel had come to the conference to stay, people wondered why, and what he was up to. Missing were the anti- American, anti-imperialist harangues that some of us had expected. Aside from some banter and a little good- natured needling, Fidel was affable, businesslike, and all but untendentious. His motives were probably mixed. He seemed to want to make a good im- pression on the Americans, a few of whom have voices that still carry- even if not as far as they once did. He may have started thinking about his place in history, and used the confer- ence accordingly. Or, as a few of us surmised, he had set off on an ego trip down memory lane-to the mo- ment when he and Cuba held center stage with the superpowers. This con- ference allowed Fidel to relive that moment again and again-the mo- ment before the Soviet Union let him down by withdrawing its missiles under American pressure. It also al- lowed some members of the Soviet delegation-they gave the impression of being far more Soviet than Rus- sian-to engage in a kind of mea culpa and, in a few cases, express chagrin at having now let Comrade Fidel down again, by withdrawing support. POTATO EA TER.5 Sometimes the naked taste of potato reminds me of being poor. The first bites are gratitude, the rest contented boredom. The little kitchen still flickers like a candlelit room in a folktale. Never again was my father so angry, my mother so still as she set the table, or I so much at home. --LEONARD NATHAN . A heavy undercurrent of irony was present. Here was Fidel, seemingly determined to make contact with a group of Americans whose ability to affect American policy, even if they wanted to, was marginal at best, while outside the conference center feelings were running high: the regime was being more shrilly anti-American than it had been at any time in the recent past. Early on January 9th, just a few hours before the first session of the conference opened, four Cubans were shot, three of them fatally, by a group attempting to escape from the island; not for many years had Cubans shot other Cubans. A family of nine, un- armed and including a small child, had tried to steal a boat from a marina near Havana. They overpowered two guards, tied them up, and took their weapons. Two other guards appeared, and were also overpowered. But the would-be escapees were unable to start the boat. They panicked and shot the four defenseless guards. The survivor identified one of his assailants, and the family were quickly rounded up while fleeing to another marina. The next morning, the front page of Granma, the Party newspaper, was evenly di- vided between stories about this event and the opening of the conference, with further comment on the three adventurers from Florida. The conference provided historians, Cubanologists, and missile-crisis buffs with a lot of new material to think and argue about. Three days before it began, the State Department released the texts of twelve newly declassified letters be- tween John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. It did so, though, only after a lawsuIt was filed under the . Freedom of Information Act. The correspondence, which Khrushchev launched just two days after agreeing, on October 28th, to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba, dealt mainly with the terms of the settlement of the crisis. Chief among the surprises in the let- ters was a disclosure that Kennedy had not, as was generally understood, re- nounced the option of invading Cuba as a condition of the settlement. In a letter dated December 10th Khrushchev said that he had agreed to withdraw his missiles "relying on your assurance that the United States and its allies will not invade Cuba." Khrushchev also said in the letter that he expected to see Kennedy reëlected in 1964, adding, "That is, that you will be the U.S. President for six years, which would I " appea to us. Kennedy replied on December 14th, saying that American forbearance on invading Cuba would depend on Cuba's .." . . commIttIng no aggressIve acts agaInst the nations of the Western Hemi- sphere." Quite clearly, this was infor- mation new to Castro. The conference was held in a modernistic structure that seemed over- sized, probably because it had been built for the 1979 summit meeting of nonaligned nations. It is in a district that was once the city's most fashion- able but is now abandoned except for a handful of embassies and protocol houses. The main and quite unex- pected event of the conference in- volved a series of sober exchanges about Soviet missile warheads in Cuba, which caused a few of the Americans present, including Robert S. McNa- mara, the former Secretary of Defense and World Bank president, to con-